The Bird Singers: How Two Boys Discovered the Magic of Birdsong

“A mesmerizing tale like no other.”—Priyanka Kumar, author of Conversations with Birds

“A beautiful book. The writing about birds—their songs and sounds, what birds mean to us, the wonder and joy they evoke in us—is among the most original, insightful, and enjoyable I’ve read.”—James Macdonald Lockhart, author of Wild Air: In Search of Birdsong

This captivating memoir takes readers into the eccentric world of competitive bird-calling—following the coming-of-age story of two boys who found their voice in the natural world.

This captivating book brings together two birds of a feather: Jean and Johnny, boys from very different worlds growing up in a small village in France. Jean is the genteel pharmacist’s son, dressed in his Sunday best; Johnny’s father is a rough, working-class sheep herder, always with the odor of animals clinging to him. Each year, over three hundred bird species visit their village, which intersects a major migratory flyway.

The two boys’ stories converge when Jean enters a bird-calling contest. He places second, and at only eleven years old becomes a child celebrity on the bird-calling circuit. Then Johnny starts to compete as well. At the annual bird festival, both boys are standouts, and a long, admiring rivalry develops between them, eventually culminating in the European championships.

As they evolve as performers, the two boys’ identities become more distinct: Jean is soft-spoken, while Johnny likes to play to the crowd. While most of their competitors are adult men, hunters who learned to call birds for sport, the two boys are fascinated with the pure beauty of birdsong, and in trying to transcend themselves through imitating birds. Their shared passion develops into an enduring partnership as performers, and they go on to tour the world in concert as the Bird Singers.

This is a story as much about friendship as it is about birdsong. The setting is timeless and bucolic, with long walks to small village schools, games of pick-up soccer, and father-son birding trips. The chapters, which bounce back and forth between the two narrators, are woven through with descriptions of colorful characters in the bird-calling competition circuit and the kind of ornithological detail that can only come from a true passion for birds. There is poetry in the description of the different birds, from common seagulls to thrushes and bluethroats and nightingales, and something like communion in the way Jean and Johnny understand the feathered friends they imitate.

Unique, evocative, and cinematic, The Bird Singers is the story of an unlikely friendship, sparked by a desire to speak with the avian world.

Jean Boucault and Johnny Rasse first learned to imitate bird calls as children in northern France. Their rivalry at bird calling competitions gave way to friendship, and now to a partnership as performers. Although Boucault and Rasse are trained as a pharmacist and engineer respectively, their passion for birds led them to create a stage show under the name Les chanteurs d’oiseaux (the Bird Singers), recording an album and touring in France and internationally.

Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor, and translator whose work has appeared in various Canadian and international publications. Her collection What if red ran out was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and won the Gerald Lampert award for best first book. Her book translations include Martine Delvaux’s White Out, Stéphane Martelly’s Little Girl Gazelle, and Marie-Claire Blais’s final novels. Her translations of David Clerson’s first novel, Brothers, and of A Cemetery for Bees, by Alina Dumitrescu, were shortlisted for Governor General’s Awards, and her translation of Clerson’s short story collection, To See Out the Night, won the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation.